I have grown to be a fan of Hyper-V over the years. It has broad hardware support, costs nothing extra, and can easily be enabled on Windows Server. This makes it a prime candidate for anyone with a home lab. My setup is built on Windows Server 2016 and I use Hyper-V to host a number of virtual servers and workstations for testing. But like most home labs, and the rest of the PCs in my house, they are not joined to a domain which can make remotely managing Hyper-V difficult. To work around the problem I would typically RDP to the server to use the Hyper-V Manager on the server. But this is not the best solution.

I always set my network location to public when Windows prompts me to classify a network the first time my PC is connected. This works well most of the time but there are certain Windows features that require the network location to be set to private to function such as PowerShell Remoting. If you need to change your network location setting from public to private, the easiest method is to use the HomeGroup settings window.

Every day we use more and more data. I’m talking about all the messages, documents and pictures we create or receive from others. A lot of this data is highly valuable, such as family videos and pictures or even your tax documents. All of this must be stored securely and safely. After all, we don’t want a disk drive issue to result in a loss of this valuable data. So how do we protect it?

Want more control over each app that is playing sound on Windows 10? With the help an easy registry tweak, you can restore the volume mixer from Windows 7 that provide more flexibility than the simplified control that replaced it in Windows 10.

If you own a Google Chromecast streaming device, you can easily share a browser tab in Chrome browser or even your entire desktop. This can be very useful when presenting from your laptop or if you just want to watch something on a big screen that is only on your PC. The only requirement is you must be on the same network as your Chromecast device and using a recent version of the Chrome browser.

Keeping your Windows PC up to date is the most important thing you can do to keep your personal information secure. In addition, an up-to-date PC is less likely to be infested with malware which is not just bad for you, but its bad to everyone else in the world if it ends up in a botnet. That is why I'm very happy that Microsoft has taken an aggressive approach by automatically installing updates when they become available by default. This is perfect for the average consumer that doesn't want to worry about maintaining yet another thing. But for advanced users that prefer more control, it can be incredibly annoying. So rather than disable automatic updates completely which is just a terrible idea, how about configuring Windows 10 to prompt when an update is ready to be installed?

One of the most frequently asked questions I receive about Windows is from users asking to restore the old behavior of Windows Explorer. Upon launch, the old Windows Explorer would simply list your drives compared to the new File Explorer that displays recently/frequently accessed content by default. There were a number of ways to change the launch behavior over the years, my personal favorite was tweaking the Windows Explorer shortcut. In Windows 10, Microsoft finally made it really easy for everyone to customize this setting.